But then it is true that the richer they are, the more miserly they are. But this news is beautiful precisely because it is unbelievable. Elon Musk – the second wealthiest man in the world – does not pay the rent to a landlord who is not just any one: it is King Charles III. Who certainly has no problem putting together lunch with dinner, but he has decided that he doesn’t like it. And he’s suing Elon Musk because the tycoon doesn’t pay him the rent for Twitter’s London office.
This was revealed by the BBC Crown Estate, which manages the sovereign’s properties: King Charles III denounced Twitter for not having paid the rent of the office in the Piccadilly Circus area. The rent has not been paid since October 2022, the same month in which the tycoon bought the social platform for 44 billion dollars (about 40 billion euros). The BBC reports that the Crown Estate took action against Twitter as a last resort, after unsuccessfully contacting the company, multiple times, about late rent payments.
In 2021, the company had signed a 2.6 million pounds (about 2.9 million euros) lease for the third floor of the building in Piccadilly Circus. But the “real controversy” is believed to concern the first-floor office that Twitter has occupied in the same building since 2014. For the moment, what Musk thinks of the matter is a mystery: the tycoon has not (yet) produced social comments and the branch British Twitter did not respond to requests for clarification from the British press.
Of course – as the New York Times points out – the new dispute is the sequel to the one that was reported last December. Then it turned out that “Twitter, to cut costs”, for weeks had not paid the rent “of its headquarters in San Francisco and all its offices around the world“. The owner of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters has filed legal action against the company in recent months. And now King Charles has decided to do the same.
In short, the Twitter affair continues to create problems for the new owner Elon Musk. Since the tycoon bought the platform on Oct. 27, thousands of people have abandoned their profiles, advertisers have quit, avalanches of employees have been fired, others have left of their own free will, the entire security apparatus data of millions of users has been dismantled and even technical problems are starting to emerge. And now also against the monarchy.